 The tournament of Chinese environmental protection: Strong or weak competition?Jiayi Wang and Ping Lei Ecological Economics, 2021, vol. 181, issue C Abstract: Promotion is an overwhelming motivation for local cadres in China. In the past, local cadres used to compete in economic tournaments for career advancement. As the central government shifts to emphasizing environmental protection, it is critical to examine whether the changed incentive structure drives local cadres to pursue environmental protection. Adopting a database covering cadres and pollution discharge for prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2016, this paper investigates the relationship between environmental protection tournaments and cadre promotion and explores the mechanism of environmental protection tournaments. The results show that environmental protection tournaments have contributed to cadres' promotion since 2007, when the central government's attention shifted to environmental protection. Environmental protection tournaments mitigate pollution in a “strong” way, through direct policy intervention. Our findings indicate that the existing incentive structure for local cadres' environmental protection is necessary but insufficient. Keywords: Environment policy; Promotion tournament; Performance measurement; Local government; Incentive mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:181:y:2021:i:c:s0921800920305589 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106888 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier |
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